History Today

Gobineau and the Aryan Myth

Michael D. Biddiss describes one of the chief originators of the pernicious racist doctrines that have played so malevolent a part in the history of modern Germany. Gobineau was a French historian whom a nineteenth-century German professor once described as a ‘God-inspired hero’.

Giuseppe Mazzini: 1805-1872

E.E.Y. Hales describes Europe's premier revolutionary between the years 1835 and 1860, who was inspired by patriotism, belief in democracy, and lofty religious ideals.

Gerald Wellesley: A Victorian Dean

Georgina Battiscombe introduces the Dean of Windsor; the wisest of Queen Victoria’s private counsellors and a relation of the Duke of Wellington.

Fox as Orator

In 18th-century British politics, eloquence might change votes on the spot. Loren Reid describes how the voice of Whig politician Charles James Fox often did exactly that.

Feargus O’Connor: Irishman and Chartist

Donald Read describes how, during the 1830s and 1840s an Irishman, claiming royal descent, became the hero of British working men in the Chartist campaign for universal suffrage and equal Parliamentary representation.

Confrontation in Central Asia, 1885

Raymond A. Mohl describs how the nineteenth century history of Anglo-Russian conflict in Central Asia is marked by gradual Russian advances and gradual British retreats.